


Wherein The Silly Humans Didn't Build The Wormhole Right

by Timeroot



Category: Contact (1997)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 06:16:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timeroot/pseuds/Timeroot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The foreigners are decent at bridging light years, yes, but everyone has problems with inferential distances. Design flaws in the wormhole lead to Bad Things for Elli.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wherein The Silly Humans Didn't Build The Wormhole Right

Ellie jerked to a standstill, the vibrations vanished without the slightest ring, the walls grew opaque and the room shut itself off to black.

"You have no idea how long it took to reverse-engineer you, especially with all those oscillations," a voice says. Some sort of synaesthetic light flashes in time with the words. Or maybe in time with their meaning ... if that was a phrase with meaning. She was fairly certain it wasn't. "We're still reading your memories, and it will take-"

The sound cut out, the lights went dark again, and then reappeared.

"-too long, sorry, your feedback loops aren't as well organized as we'd hoped. Still better than the current median memory entropy, though, so you can feel good about that. And I guess you'll need to since this readout also suggests intelligence as being one of the most valuable aspects of yourself."

More silence. More black. Several seconds seemed to tick along, as Ellie's mind reeled.

"The device isn't responding. Goddammit-"

The sound cut out again, and the color managed to flash bright and desaturated at the same time, as the correlation software stumbled over the untranslatable proper noun.

"-if this is your fault in the interfacing again, I swear to God. Its loops are still firing, and they don't pass any statistical tests for randomness so it's probably conscious. Can we try stimulation?"

More colors flashed, the noise modulated, the words played backwards and forwards, scents flew in her nose, the colors died, the scents morphed; ethers and esters and ketones stimulated nerves in spectra no known chemical did. The computer, urged on by the neural equivalent of reeling backwards in a sudden wind, decided to stimulate this nerve bundle further. Ellie felt flavors rolling over her tongue, like colors, like sounds, like smells. This did have the desired effect of bringing Ellie further out of her semi-conscious, passive state - but backfired in that it was exactly the kind of experience that would make an awake person want to lay back down in bed again. Or, preferably, a lawn chair, with a masseuse behind them.

The human tongue has the primary purpose of aiding formation of a food bolus, and the secondary function of detecting chemicals to provide the owner with an indicator of which nutrients are inside. However, its visibility from the outside, and speech capability, coupled with its conveyance of this nutrition information through pure, inarticulable qualia, has helped it to develop a significant (and well deserved) apportionment of mythos. These stories (more often fictitious than not) range from cutting out the tongue to rob magical power, to the idea that only certain parts taste certain types, to young adults who have come under the illusion that exaggerating their skill at kissing will arouse the opposite sex enough to be interested. There are also some self-fulfilling prophecies (often called jokes) around the organ: "You are now are of your tongue in your mouth". The only thing that keeps humans sane afterwards is that the body is very good at learning to ignore it, because really now, it's been there your whole life, and it's about time to get over it.

This is why the much rarer experience of finding no tongue whatsoever for the tastes to be experienced on is so much more disconcerting. It's almost enough to make you forget to feel the lack of a mouth.

These two shocks, in turn, is why Ellie began to scream her piercing cry at the top of her lungs.


End file.
